~ my Potato Point life

Category Archives: photography

When I posted my collection of diagonals, one of my photographic mentors posed a new challenge. “It occurred to me to suggest that you also experiment with asymmetrical compositions in your photographs” she said, and sent me one of her photos as inspiration.

Fringe lily photographed by Rosemary Barnard

I can't pass by a good challenge, so I have indeed been experimenting. The experiments have changed the balance and focus in my photos, driven me back to photographing in landscape, and given me the opportunity to post old subject matter in a new guise. In this new mode, shadows and the patterns and textures of sand are highlighted rather than subdued by other subject matter and the part takes over from the whole.

It was Arthur Boyd who first introduced me to horizontal composition. What at first seemed banal, gradually revealed itself as a way of celebrating the landscape differently, almost archaeologically. Seascapes provide me with a perfect opportunity to capture the horizontal, although the paintings that caught my attention were of the rocky river edges of the Shoalhaven near his property at Bundanon.

Arthur Boyd Shoalhaven with black cockatoo and swan

Arthur Boyd River bush 1976

Boyd's inspiration was topped up by Fred Williams, most obviously, but not only, by his panel paintings which did something different with horizontals and enabled him to create a new dimension.

Fred Williams Beachscape, Erith Island 1974

Fred Williams Forest pond 1974

I learnt a different way of seeing from these masters, who offered me an alternative to the obsessive diagonal.

It’s been raining for a week: not a deluge, just continuous and soaking. On Sunday it ‘s worn itself out and offers only an occasional splutter of drops. I grab my sturdy walking stick (once a slender spotted gum) and climb down the giant stairs into the bush below the house.

I know where the patch of wasp orchids is. I only have to follow the pipe leading down to the creek, although I make doubly sure by following my companion. He’s struggling with a long piece of recalcitrant piping, which doesn’t seem keen to cross the creek to become the frame of a garden dome.

There are three orchids in a little nook between logs. They are tiny, almost to the point of invisibility and I am grateful for my guide, whose orchid eyes are superior to mine once he disentangles himself from his snaking companion.

Two of the orchids are beginning to droop and fold, but the third one is at its peak. I contort myself to kneel within photographic reach. Maybe I’ll add a small kneeling pillow to my orchid-hunting gear. After all, they use them in churches, and my worship these days is in devotion to orchids. I notice with some horror that my camera battery is fading and snap frantically hoping to finish before it dies. The camera is my only hope of seeing the wasp orchid clearly because it is so small.

The leaves are the most visible part, glossy green after the rain. There are more leaves there than there will be flowers in this vegetative colony. They are there both immediately before and after the flowering, but they disappear between flowerings. As usual my camera doesn’t want to focus on both flower and leaves.

The flower is tiny, barely as big as my little fingernail. However, small is no barrier to intricacy and cunning. Orchids have been evolving for 80 million years, (so Ziegler claims – a Google search got swamped by sites for cultivationg orchids in your garden) and they’ve made good use of the time, many of them co-evolving with their insect pollinators. Their bilateral symmetry allows them to impersonate insects convincingly, which is exactly what the wasp orchid does, using pseudo-copulation to ensure the survival of the species.

The labellum which is covered in rich crimson calli resembles the body of the wingless female Thynnine wasp and thereby attracts the male Thynnine. What satisfies the orchid – the collection of its pollinia with its cargo of pollen to be transported elsewhere – has to leave the pollinating wasp frustrated. A frustrated copulater will go seeking sexual fulfilment elsewhere, with a bit of luck (for the orchid) with another wasp orchid, which it will then pollinate.

About a third of all orchids – 9000 species – use this kind of trick with varying degrees of sophistication and reward for the lustful insect. Such deception is just one of what Darwin calls the “beautiful contrivances” of orchids. And it happens on a hillside near Bodalla.

My library of orchid books is growing.

Christian Ziegler Deceptive beauties: the world of wild orchids is a collection of wonderful images, from Borneo, Panama, the Swiss Alps and even Australia, with text that discusses orchid distribution, evolution, and pollination. I owe it for my understanding of pseudo copulation and Annette for giving it to me.

I’ve also discovered, but not yet acquired, Charles Darwin’s cogitations on orchids: The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects.

These orchids are the most resplendent and noticeable of all the species I’ve spotted so far. A splash of pink on a tall scape against a spotted gum, sometimes up to my waist (I’m beginning the long journey to scientific measurement!), they can’t be missed. I’ve even spotted them from the car as I drive along the road into Potato Point.

However they are also the most recalcitrant to the camera. Somehow with them I lose my newly acquired mastery of depth of field. Good clear images of the splotched sepals guarantees a blurred labellum, and the luxuriance of blooms – up to 60 on a scape -often leads to photographic confusion and lack of focal point.

The photographer doesn’t have the luxury of the painter, who can gently relocate flowers in the interests of composition and clarity. To add to my catalogue of complaints, any idea of photographing the tall stems against the backgound of the bush is a delusion. I now sympathise with my father’s frustrated desire to photograph a white sheep on a green hill against the sunset. The real world doesn’t vouchsafe such things, except to the devout and devoted expert.

For the last few weeks I’ve made a short pilgrimage to a colony of hyacinth orchids near the house on the bush block where I spend weekends. They develop slowly, so I’ve managed to capture their progress from a tip, barely out of the ground,

to a tall scape with buds beginning to plump and reveal the characteristic speckles.

If I download a pile of disastrous shots, I only have to walk down past the clothesline for another attempt … and another … and another.

After two photographic sessions on the same day, and close examination of the plants in nature and on the screen, I suddenly realise that I am possibly visiting two species, not one. One lot of scapes is delicate and pale green; the other thick, almost woody, and maroon. This is exciting, but also a bit daunting, because it means I’ll need to expend ID energy again, and I thought I had this one nailed. Fortunately, there aren’t hundreds of cousins to choose from in this species.

My interest seems to augur doom for orchids. Fire took the greenhood; a tractor disappeared sun orchids and glossodias. And this is what I found on my last visit to the hyacinth colony –

the budding top of the scape neatly decapitated. This plant won’t continue through its cycle to seed pods.

As I rhapsodised in praise of Dipodium punctatum, I remembered that Douglas Stewart has written a number of poems about orchids. I tracked down hyacinth orchids in a poem called Aboriginal axe, and found this to undermine the glory:

Lovely and leprous, flushed and spotted / The hyacinth orchid bloomed and rotted.

I can handle rotted, but leprous is a bit hard to take. However he does restore some beauty in a later line:

The orchid stands up glowing and tall.

That however wasn’t the end of the dark side. Reading Eucalypts: a celebration by John Wrigley and Murray Fagg I found that hyacinth orchids are also hemi-parasitic. I’d noticed that they seemed to particularly enjoy the company of spotted gums (Corymbia maculata). Wrigley and Fagg tell me they grow in the leaf litter at the foot of eucalypts and use a fungus to link with their host so they can draw on it for sustenance. At least as hemi-parasites they bear some of the burden of their own life through photosynthesis.